Both, of course, might be at work. But credit policy may be more important than either. The credit crunch now suffocating peripheral Europe is not just the endogenous consequence of weak growth or the Greek crisis; it is also rooted in deliberate policy choices. In October of 2010, Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel had their famous walk on the beach in Deauville, France and decided that Greece, and sovereign debt more generally, would no longer be sacrosanct: investors in such debt could be subject to default. In July, 2011, such “private sector involvement” (PSI) became official euro zone policy: holders of sovereign debt would have to accept haircuts as a condition of future bailouts. At the same time, the European Banking Authority began its “capital exercise”: European banks would undergo a second round of stress tests, and those found wanting would have to boost capital ratios. But since weak banks couldn’t turn to weak sovereigns or some pan-European fund for new capital, they would have to reduce loans instead.
Mario Draghi, the ECB's president, later called the PSI decisions Europe’s Lehman. When America let Lehman Brothers fail in September, 2008, it shattered an assumption that had, little noticed, long underpinned America’s capital markets: that a large, systemically important intermediary would not be allowed to fail. That assumption should not have been allowed to take hold in the first place, but once it did, its sudden nullification triggered panic and a credit crunch out of proportion to the actual extent of impaired loans. In Europe, regulators had long assigned a zero risk weight to sovereign debt, which, as a result, comprised a major part of banks’ capital, and collateral for funding. Moreover, European banks depended either implicitly or explicitly on the presence of a solvent sovereign to bail them out. Declaring that sovereigns would be allowed to fail meant declaring their banks would be allowed to fail, too. As with Lehman, one can argue that Europe's sovereigns and banks should never have been perceived as risk free. But by removing that perception, the decisions in October of 2010 and July, 2011 caused sovereign spreads to blow out, deposits to flee peripheral banks, and, coupled with the capital exercise, a devastating credit crunch and recession. In 2011, before the worst of these impacts were felt, the ECB reckoned tightened credit conditions stripped two percentage points off the region’s growth. The effect must undoubtedly have grown since, and probably exceeds that of austerity.
Mr Trichet may have been wrong to praise austerity but he was almost certainly right to warn that changing the status of sovereign debt was potentially catastrophic. Indeed, the ECB wanted austerity less for its alleged confidence-inducing effects than as a quid pro quo for backstopping sovereign debt and thereby maintaining its risk-free status. Political leaders spoiled that effort; they later, reluctantly, backed away from PSI but raised the specter again by bailing in Cyprus' depositors. The ECB has nonetheless done what it can; its announcement last fall of unlimited support for the sovereign debt of countries that accept budget oversight has brought spreads back down. Today Mr Draghi said the ECB is consulting with other European institutions on using asset-backed securities to kick start lending to small and medium sized enterprises. One way might be for the European Investment Bank to borrow from the ECB to buy such securities.
Events of the last few years should leave no doubt about the influence of credit policy on growth. But how should that contribution be modeled? While the policy rate and the size of the monetary base, the traditional metrics of monetary policy, are easily measured, credit policy is more diverse and often not even seen as policy (as the Lehman and PSI decisions attest). Examples of credit policy tightening in recent years include the new Basel 3 capital and liquidity rules and in America, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac clawing back losses on mortgages originated during the boom; stringent new underwriting standards; the Dodd-Frank prohibition on bailouts; and various other state and federal level rules governing the supply of credit. In other countries, authorities have imposed higher down payment requirements on houses, and introduced capital controls to slow the inflow of foreign capital. Examples of eased credit policy include Britain’s Funding for Lending and America’s various foreclosure mitigation schemes. Some of these policies manifest themselves in the credit spread; some are harder to detect, showing up in the supply of, or demand for, credit.